Surface Illumination Controls Scale

[ltethe]

How would I get an objects surface illumination to control it's scale.

[joojaa]

Thets a tricky one. render 2 times? See the problem is that the surface illumination isnt known ahead of time, Also it depends on how you calculate the immumination amount. Do you itegrate the whole sirface or just sample one point isn apsce with a dnormal direction or just a point (a point can only have a value of how much ist shadowwed).

[ltethe]

Hmm... You're right.

I tried messing with the surface info utility node, but I ran into problems exactly like you describe.

Ok...

So how about this instead?

I've made an object scale another object based on the object's inverse distance from itself. It's a coupla utility nodes dumped together, simple, and yet more complex then I would have hoped.

It's great for a handful of objects, but I've got to get thousands of them to scale based on their distance from one object. Do I have any alternatives to .mel scripting?

I say this because as much as I know I've got to get into .mel scripting one day. Today, I have no background in it all, and really don't know where to start to make something like this happen.